The Voter File

by David Pepper

  The yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” sticker covered the top left corner of the truck cabin’s back window, with an “I Carry” sticker below it, followed by the impressively subtle “Deport Illegals (Future Democrats)” below that. And in case the second sticker left any doubt, a rifle rack hung inside the truck’s back window. The window’s right corner displayed an American flag, a Green Bay Packers sticker, and a diagnosis Mr. Stiglitz apparently agreed with: “Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder.” The rusty bumper below boasted more jarring messages: “Politically Incorrect and Proud of It,” “Can’t Feed ’Em, Don’t Breed ’Em,” and, showing spirited local flavor and keen historical insight, “McCarthy Was Right.”

  I double-checked my clipboard to confirm it. Despite his mobile billboard of right-wing views, Mr. Stiglitz—who hadn’t missed a presidential general election or primary in decades—had skipped the special election.

  “Who is it?” a husky voice asked a minute later, after I’d knocked on the door three times.

  “My name’s Jack Sharpe. I used to work at Republic News.” Conservatives generally liked the station.

  “Yeah? So?”

  “You’re Ernest, right? I wanted to talk about the most recent election.”

  The door cracked open six inches and a thick round head appeared on the other side. A week’s growth of beard on the man’s jowls, chin, and neck was only slightly shorter than the buzz cut on top.

  “What about it? Frickin’ disaster as far as I’m concerned.”

  “And why’s that?”

  The door opened a few inches more.

  “President Moore?” He scowled, the veins in his lower neck lifting his dry skin like thin wires. “She’s taking this country straight to hell.”

  “I’m sorry. I meant the special election a few months back. For the Wisconsin Supreme Court.”

  The tension left his face. “Oh, that one.”

  “Yeah. Can I ask you who you voted for?”

  His eyelids sagged. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t end up voting in that one.”

  He didn’t widen the door, so our conversation was going to stay at the doorstep.

  “Not with all that was at stake?”

  His chin wrinkled as he tilted his head back. “Hey, buddy, why’re you asking me this stuff?”

  “I’m looking into that election. It was a surprising result.”

  “Not really. No one was paying attention. I didn’t hear much either way.”

  Odd. As a Flannery “one,” he should’ve received a surge of information imploring him to vote.

  “You’re a passionate Republican.” I gestured back to his pickup truck. “Didn’t they remind you to vote?”

  “I might’ve gotten a phone call or two. Told them I supported whoever that Republican was. But I didn’t hear much after that.”

  “Well, when—”

  “But I also saw some things that made me not too excited about the Republican, either.”

  “Like what?”

  “On the internet. You know, those annoying ads that pop up when you’re trying to read stuff. This guy was squeamish. A RINO for sure.” RINO: Republican in name only—the same accusation they’d used to take out my dad.

  “You didn’t receive any mail?”

  “I don’t remember any. But the ads online—I remember those. Mealy-mouthed crap. We don’t need weak-kneed Republicans in office, for cripes sakes. Either way, I basically forgot about the election till it was over.”

  He started to close the door.

  “So you didn’t get any late calls, texts, or mail urging you to vote?”

  “I didn’t. It’s like they didn’t want my vote. Well, they got what they deserved if that’s the case. RINOs don’t respect us true conservatives.”

  I made five other home visits the rest of the day. Two senior couples, a forty-five-year-old homemaker, a junior partner at a law firm, and another whose pickup truck rivaled Stiglitz’s. They all told the same story: little contact from the campaign and no turnout push at the end. And two others complained that the digital ads had made Flannery seem unacceptably moderate.

  I filled Tori in as I drove back to my motel, summarizing the day’s conversations.

  “They didn’t even text at the end to remind them to vote? Or call?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Strange. That’s the bare minimum you’d do for your ‘ones.’ And were the digital ads they didn’t like run by Flannery?”

  “Sounded like it. They were positive, but centrist, scaring off the conservatives.”

  “That’s what you’d send to ‘threes.’ Not ‘ones.’ I can’t imagine my counterparts on that campaign committing malpractice like that.”

  “Do you actually know them? The manager? The voter file manager?”

  “Not personally, but I know they’ve been around enough to know what they were doing.”

  “How about we track them down and find out?”

  CHAPTER 23

  TULSA, OKLAHOMA

  You’re gonna win this thing, Angelique,” the twenty-four-year-old campaign manager said as they drove up to their first poll on Election Day, minutes before seven. “You’re gonna make history.”

  “Well, what’s new?” Angelique asked with an indulgent laugh. The kid didn’t get the joke, but Angelique Robbins had spent her life breaking barriers.

  In her neighborhood. At school. Even at family reunions. As the daughter of a white Oklahoman dad and a Vietnamese mom—they’d met during his second tour, she was born twelve months later, then Dad had tracked mother and daughter down after the war and brought them home to Tulsa—she’d always stood out growing up. With her dark olive skin, round eyes, and black hair, no one else in her world looked anything like her.

  Reactions had evolved as she grew up. In elementary school they either looked at her funny or ignored her. In middle school they bullied her, so she focused on her studies. Once she hit her teenage years, the boys fancied her, lifting her confidence. Angelique graduated as both class valedictorian and homecoming queen—the first ever to do so.

  Decades later she was hours away from becoming the first Asian American member of the Oklahoma State Legislature.

  After her manager’s morning pep talk, Angelique spent the next two hours chasing down voters in the parking lot of a north Tulsa voting location. Turnout was light, so she shook the hand of every person who walked in. Car-to-car as opposed to door-to-door.

  “You definitely got my vote,” one elder gentleman said as their hands parted.

  “Thank you. You honor me with your confidence.”

  After voting in her home precinct, which two cameras filmed live, she stopped by two more polling locations that morning. Light turnout, even over the lunch hour. But still a generally friendly response.

  “How is it out there?” Angelique asked her manager when he rejoined her shortly after one.

  “Looks fine,” he said, his brow wrinkled as he said it.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Tell me. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “Nothing to be alarmed about. Turnout’s a little light.”

  “Well, of course it is. It’s a special for a statehouse seat.”

  “I know, but it’s light in places where we expected better.”

  “Oh.”

  Her skin suddenly prickled. Her chest tightened. Both new sensations. She’d led from the campaign’s first day—fawned over as the favorite, including a glowing profile in the World touting her as a rising star and a future congresswoman. It had never dawned on her that she might lose. Until now. Even that sliver of doubt made her nervous as hell.

  “But we have hours to go and we’re blowing up the phones now,” he said through a strained smile. “We have a lot of time left.”


  “Okay. Good.”

  But the feeling in the pit in her stomach remained. Hundreds of friends and family members had stepped up to help, expecting a win. So many had given money. Held parties. Bragged about her to their friends. Many were standing at polls right now. How would she ever explain losing?

  She greeted voters at a church, a school, and an American Legion hall over the next four hours, grabbing a late lunch in between. Turnout was still light. And she was also learning how to read voters. Those who planned on voting for her would say without hesitation, “I got you,” “I’m voting for you,” and “You got my vote!” Those who’d just voted for her were equally explicit as they walked out. A thumbs-up and “I got you.”

  Those who didn’t vote for her? They were polite. They usually said hello. But they didn’t say the words. They didn’t commit. And they didn’t look her in the eye even as they wished her luck. With her manager’s update echoing in her head, every voter who walked by and didn’t commit juiced her nerves a little more.

  She was standing outside an elementary school when her manager rejoined her.

  “Any news?” she asked, with an hour to go.

  “It’s going to be close, Angelique.” A trace of perspiration shone on his brow.

  They’d never once talked about it being close.

  “Is it? Did things not pick up?”

  “A little.”

  “Where we needed them to?”

  “We hope.”

  “I don’t understand. What happened to this morning’s confidence?”

  He jammed his hands in his pockets.

  “We’re going back over the file now. The modeling might have been off. Or something.”

  “‘Or something’? What does that mean?”

  “We’re checking.”

  Forty minutes later a large crowd of volunteers, staff, and friends cheered as Angelique walked into Molly’s Pub for her victory party, a smile frozen on her face. They were all expecting a win.

  The polls closed at 7:30 p.m. and the first returns—the early and absentee mail-in votes—came in minutes after. Tied, as expected.

  But the crowd quieted once the day’s returns started coming in. Angelique was down from the start and lost ground quickly. A few cheers erupted after several highly partisan areas came in in her favor, but those spurts reversed quickly.

  By 8:40 it was over.

  By 9:00 the pub had cleared out.

  Angelique Robbins had begun her day excited to make history. She lost, 54 to 46 percent.

  CHAPTER 24

  KIEV, UKRAINE

  Drac always called at the worst times.

  From the back of a black limousine, Katrina was admiring the verdant banks of the Dnieper as it cut through Kiev. The drive back to the airport followed a productive meeting with the soybean king of Ukraine, who was scooping up farms across the American Midwest at a breakneck pace.

  “The Oklahoma operation was our most effective to date,” Drac said.

  “How so?”

  “Several new techniques are proving to be incredibly powerful.”

  The limousine veered left to cross a Soviet-style bridge. An old cruise ship was docked on the riverbank below, similar to the type she’d seen in Brooklyn as a girl.

  “Good. Even better than Wisconsin and Florida?”

  “We have fine-tuned our approach since those elections.”

  “So that means our work is harder to trace?”

  “They will not detect it,” Drac said. “The losing campaign will be confused—blamed as incompetent. They will never know that their data was actually quite accurate. The irony is that the better the campaign, the more effective our work will be.”

  Halfway across the bridge, Katrina gazed back at the Dnieper’s right bank, dominated by an immense statue of a robed woman lifting both a sword and a shield. Amid the promising updates, the robust figure reminded her of her greatest concern.

  “Any further activity in Appleton?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Good. Let’s hope that’s the end of it.”

  CHAPTER 25

  NEAR MADISON, WISCONSIN

  It was like a Cold War summit. Two sides who’d worked against each other for months now eyeing each other face-to-face.

  And I was the UN.

  “Strange circumstances,” Johnny Yost, Flannery’s campaign manager, mumbled when we first sat down at the greasy spoon just off the highway. Next to Johnny was a mousy guy with glasses named Ned, the voter file manager.

  With Tori sitting to my left, we all mostly just stared at each other in between ordering and sipping orange juice. They clammed up at most of my questions, while Tori’s hand wipe process only heightened the awkwardness.

  I finally dissected the problem. Both Ned’s and Johnny’s eyes were glued on Tori even when I was speaking. Her presence—the opponent’s data guru—was putting them on edge.

  “Tori, why don’t you tell them why you called me?”

  As Tori told her story from Election Day onward—no bullshit, friendly, sincere—they eased up. My guess was that, while they were intrigued by both her appearance and what she was saying, what won them over was that she was willing to say it to the enemy. I didn’t know another person in politics who would do such a thing.

  “So you suspect foul play?” Yost asked.

  “Let’s just say I’m here to dig into it,” I said.

  “And what have you found so far?”

  “Something fishy took place. But we won’t know unless we also understand what happened on your end.”

  Their shoulders sagged simultaneously. The topic triggered painful memories.

  “The end of the campaign was a complete nightmare,” Yost said.

  “How so?”

  “We felt good most of the way through.” His right hand tightened into a fist. “We had a good sense of what we needed to tell the undecideds. We’d built a robust model about which voters needed to turn out for us, we knew who your voters were, and it was clear that we way outnumbered you.”

  “That’s how I saw it, too,” Tori said.

  Yost looked down at the table.

  “And then our turnout cratered. There were warning signs in the early vote period—a lot of committed voters flaking—but we hoped Election Day would make up for it. Halfway through the day, we knew something was wrong. Our best voters weren’t turning out, nor were our leaners—and so many of the numbers we were calling were bad.” He looked at Tori. “Your voters showed up in big numbers, and then the swing voters went largely your way, which also surprised us.”

  Ned spoke up again. “I spent the rest of the week reviewing the initial numbers and couldn’t figure it out. After the official vote came in, I cross-checked our file with the final results, and it was even more bizarre.”

  “Did you tell anyone?” I asked.

  “Tell them what? That we didn’t know what happened? That the data was screwed up?” Ned’s face turned a bright pink. “Judge Flannery and the entire Republican Party already blamed us for the loss. They said our modeling was way off. Some even accused us of having misled them intentionally. So whining that something was wrong with the data would’ve only made us look worse.”

  It must have been rough. When a campaign went down in flames, the scapegoating broke out before the night ended, with managers and staff the first ones thrown under the bus. No doubt this sad pair remained unemployed because of it.

  “Would it surprise you to know that when I talked to your best voters, most hadn’t heard from you in the final weeks?”

  Ned leaned forward. “That’s bullshit. We hit our ‘ones’ hard.”

  “Some of them also complained that your digital communications made Flannery appear moderate.”

  Yost arched his back. “That’s also BS. Thos
e would’ve only gone to swing voters and independents. Our core voters got the hard-core stuff. Flannery’s a big gun guy and a strict constitutionalist. That’s what we hit our ‘ones’ with.”

  Stiglitz’s bumper stickers flashed in my mind. Those would’ve been the perfect message to get him to vote.

  “Well, the ones I talked to hadn’t seen those ads.”

  Ned pushed back again, glaring at me. “You talked to the wrong people, then.”

  Tori the peacemaker jumped in. “You guys bring your computer like we said?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let’s trade notes.”

  I sat back and let the computer folks do their thing. An information swap—peering into the other side’s data—clearly excited them more than arguing across the table. They logged on to their respective voter files.

  Tori kicked off. “We had Ernest Stiglitz, on Maple Street in Appleton, as a ‘five’—hard-core conservative.”

  “Oh, yeah, total hard-core. Big Second Amendment guy. Has both a state hunting license and a concealed carry permit.” He pointed at his screen. “See, he’s a perfect example. We hit him hard, he said he was going to vote, but he never did. We have no idea why.”

  “I know why. He told me he barely heard from you guys lately, and that Flannery was a RINO. Said your own digital ads turned him off.”

  “That’s not right.” Ned pointed at his screen. “He confirmed that he was for us early, then confirmed he was voting through both a late phone call and a text. And I have no idea how he would’ve gotten moderate messaging.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Ned, but that is right. The man told me this to my face. Your data must be off.”

  He blinked at me repeatedly in disbelief as if I’d told a preacher his Bible was wrong.

  “It’s the truth, Ned,” Tori said. “Jack talked to him for fifteen minutes.”

  “Well, then how in the hell—”

  “Either you had a major problem with your own team inputting data,” Tori said, “or someone was messing with your file.”

  Ned didn’t like either conclusion. “Let’s check out some others.”